Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A self-written waveguide is a wave-guiding structure created when an optical beam is passed through a medium, to polymerize one or more self-writing materials. Initiation of polymerization by a curing source may concentrate the optical beam, yielding a waveguide structure with dimensions that automatically scale to the guided-wave mode of the wavelength of beam used to create the waveguide path.
A self-writing approach to waveguide formation may be used as a method for creating optical interconnects and may eliminate the need for optical alignment between the interconnect and source. However, conventional self-writing approaches to waveguide formation, such as liquid resins, polymer/liquid mixtures, and photo-bleaching of pure polymers may not be optimal for time and cost-effective manufacturing.